A Long-Expected Shock

One of the strangest things about death is the dichotomy.

I mean, here you know someone is dying—say, to pick a purely hypothetical example, your mother’s twin brother has a miserable case of emphysema—you know they’re sick and you’ve seen them struggling to breathe, you’re even surprised sometimes that they’re still alive.

And yet, when they start the inevitable cascade failure that you knew was coming, you’re still shocked.

It’s been a flurry of phone calls over the last couple of days as they get him set up in hospice. Mom is a little overwrought at the moment. I can believe it. I only really know my pompous romantic of an uncle through her, although I’ve talked to him when we were in California—biked with him and gone ballroom dancing with him, that sort of thing. But he’s her twin, and that kind of history is pretty entangled. I try to picture what it’d be like if it were my brother, and I can see why the pain’s almost physical.

So it’s going to be a little stressed around here for a while.